I’ve decided we need to move again

OK, sike. That’s a total lie. I love my house, our awesome yard, the area we live in, etc., etc., etc.

HOWEVER, I do not love poison ivy or snakes, and I had to deal with BOTH of these things this past weekend.

Let’s start with the poison ivy… It turns out we have some a lot of it in our back yard. I knew we had poison ivy in our yard, but I haven’t had it since 8th grade so I foolishly thought we had very little, when it turns out we’ve got a pretty solid patch of it.

This, my friends, is what I thought poison ivy looked like:

I thought it was an olive green-y color and very waxy. And I was right. Those leaves are poison ivy leaves.

What I didn’t realize is that this is also poison ivy (mainly because this looks like EVERY OTHER PLANT!… sneaky poison ivy):

If you can’t already see where this story is going, I spent my three-day weekend with poison ivy. Good times. Not to be melodramatic, but I get poison ivy really badly. It loves my skin. In 8th grade we had a tornado go through my mom’s backyard and afterward my dog and I would spend days exploring the torn up forest behind our house. After that, I spent a week out of school with a case of poison ivy so bad that one of my eyes was swollen. Can you say hottie? When I returned to school my teacher said, “They told me you were out with poison ivy but I didn’t believe them… guess I was wrong.” Yes, it was that bad.

Needless to say, I don’t take poison ivy lightly. So, I dragged my butt to Righttime Medical Care at 9:30 p.m. in a thunderstorm on Sunday and sat and waited for them to give me medicine. They were pretty busy because it was a holiday and I guess people get hurt more often on holiday weekend (a woman came in with a gash in her head! Holy moley!!). I ended up being seen by a pediatrician. I joked with him that I am pretty much a child and he could leave me in his waiting room even longer if it meant I could watch more of the movie playing… Monsters, Inc.

Anyway, he said I caught it early (thank goodness), and sent me on my way with a prescription steroids to help it go away and not spread any further. Whew.

If my coworkers/friends/family see me hulking out later, that’s why.

My neighbors are awesome and because of the joys of Facebook they knew I had poison ivy, so they gave me a bottle of Ivarest. If you ever get poison ivy, you gotta get this stuff. It’s like calamine lotion on crack…. It has some sort of cooling agent to it, so it does a fantastic job of taking away the itch. Best neighbors ever.

My story doesn’t end here. See, I get really cranky about poison ivy… maybe even a little neurotic (ask my hubby…. He had no idea what he was in for!). I took an entire bottle of roundup to our yard to try to get rid of this pest. THEN, I learned that Roundup makes POISON IVY KILLER!!! So, I hopped in my car and grabbed more than 2.5 gallons of the stuff and set out with a vengeance to rid my yard. I used an entire gallon already. If you need to eradicate some poison ivy in your yard, definitely get the kind with the continuous spray. It was awesome.

So yes, I set about my yard angrily spraying anything that resembled poison ivy, mumbling curses of hatred under my breath. Give it another day and I’m going back for round 2! This stuff doesn’t stand a chance! I still might be doomed though… Remmy was literally standing in the massive patch if poison ivy this morning. Dang! Guess who is getting another bath!

If you’ve held out for my story about snakes, you won’t be sorry. After going crazy on the poison ivy in my yard and then having a lovely dinner with my mother-in-law, I went back outside to plant 10 strawberry plants and two tomato plants. I planted the strawberry plants with ease, then moved along to my tomato plants. After consulting with my dad, my expert gardener, we decided that I should clear out the rock bed along the side of the house to plant my tomato plants. Perfect! It gets lots of sun and would be right next to my squash, which seems to be doing nicely.

So I grabbed a shovel and started moved the rocks to the lower beds. I almost fell over backwards trying to pull back the landscaping fabric that acted as a barrier between the rock piles and the soil — that would have been a sight, huh?

Anyway, I’m shoveling and shoveling when I see this thing wiggling. At first I thought it was a slug, and then I realized it was a little snake. And then I panicked.

“SWEET BABY JESUS (hey-zeus)!!! {Insert a few choice expletives}!!!”

(I’m pretty sure my use of the that phrase came from Modern Family, but I can’t find a clip… so here’s a scene from Talladega Nights instead.)

My neighbors were outside eating dinner on their porch and shouted to ask me if everything was OK. After informing them of the snake in my bed of rocks, they came to my rescue. My one neighbor helped me take care of the snake, while her hubby-to-be and I watched from afar. When I found snake number two a few minutes later, she came back over to rescue me again. And for snake three.

By the time snake four rolled around I was calling my father to yell at him for suggesting the rock bed (he laughed), and chastising my hubby for not being able to hear my shrieks of terror and coming to my rescue. He took care of snake number four while my neighbors and I watched. And then I made him dig the holes for my tomato plants because I was too scared.

I think the snakes were Eastern Smooth Earthsnakes, aka totally harmless. But they still freaked me out just a tad, especially because of Remmy. My dog growing up was bit in the face by a copperhead snake, which eventually paralyzed the right half of her face. It was so sad. So snakes + dogs always makes me nervous

All in all, my weekend was very aventure packed. Moral of the story, my neighbors are AWESOME and came to my rescue a lot haha.

I hope you all had a great Memorial Day weekend. And to those who serve our country and put their lives on the line for our freedom every day, thank you from the bottom of my heart.